Menagerie of books in progress

On the mantlepiece in my room, there are presently two stacks of books. One is for thesis related books, sorted so as to be least likely to topple and crush me in my sleep. The other is for non-thesis books, sorted by the priority with which I mean to read them. I have read at least fifty pages of every book in each pile.

I have been reading these books for periods ranging from two days to many months. Sometimes, I wonder whether it would be more sensible to read books sequentially, one by one. I don’t really think so. This system lets me read in any of a half dozen distinctive genres or subject areas, and I don’t think I lose much comprehension on account of tracking so many strings at once. (Complex novels are an exception. I often need to force myself to start over and read through. This may be why I have never finished Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, despite at least four attempts.).

The Ballad of Reading Gaol is quite moving, though perhaps only because it related indirectly to my own situation. There’s a line in The History Boys where Mr Hector tells Posner that the great moments in literature are the ones where a line reaches out and grabs you, and you feel for a moment that an experience or sensation that was unique to you has in fact been shared by some other person, even if they are long dead. Ironically I’ve had the same thought myself and one such line is from TBRG: ‘he who lives more than one life/ more deaths than one must die’.

While reading The Ballad in Dublin, this bit struck me as having particular contemporary political significance:

With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun;
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!

The vilest deeds like poison weeds,
Bloom well in prison-air;
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the warder is Despair.

For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.